Afghan Presidential Candidate Abdullah Abdullah Won’t Recognize Election Results

Afghanistan's chief executive and candidate to the country’s presidency Abdullah Abdullah announced Sunday that he won’t recognize the general elections’ outcome if the freshly initiated recount of votes is not immediately halted. 

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Abdullah who said he would not accept “fraud-marked” results, claims that his opponent, current president, and candidate Ashraf Ghani is pushing to add 300,000 votes that were not registered through the biometric machines supplied by a German firm to prevent people from voting more than once.

"The recounting should be stopped. We are trying to save the process from fraudsters," Abdullah said at a meeting with thousands of his supporters in the capital Kabul, adding that "a fraud-marred election will not be accepted. The result should be based on the clean votes of our people."

For his part, a leader from Ghani’s campaign told international media that Abdullah's party is afraid of the vote counting because they may lose.

Abdullah's team ordered on Saturday their observers to boycott the recount initiated that same day by the Independent Electoral Commission, as preliminary results should be announced on Nov. 14, while more than a month and a half has passed since the Sept. 28 poll. Initial results were supposed to be released on Oct. 19, but the announcement has been delayed, with election officials mentioning several technical problems.

The uncertain situation suggests the possibility of another political crisis, similar to the one that came after the last presidential election in 2014 when same opponents, Abdullah and Ghani, clashed amid widespread allegations of fraud, resulting in the United States intervening to mediate a power-sharing deal between the rivals under the same unity government.